Oliver Herring was born
in Heidelberg, Germany in 1964, and lives and works in Brooklyn,
New York. He received a BFA from the University of Oxford (Ruskin
School of
Drawing and
Fine
Art),
Oxford,
England,
and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. Among Herring’s
early works were his woven sculptures and performance pieces in
which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material,
into human figures, clothing, and furniture. These ethereal sculptures,
which evoke introspection, mortality, and memory, are Herring’s
hommage to Ethyl Eichelberger, a drag performance artist who committed
suicide in 1991. Since 1998, Herring has created stop-motion videos
and participatory performances with ‘off-the-street’ strangers.
He makes sets for his videos and performances with minimal means
and materials, recycling elements from one artwork to the next.
Open-ended and impromptu, Herring’s videos have a dreamlike
stream-of-consciousness quality; each progresses towards a finale
that is unexpected or unpredictable. Embracing chance and chance
encounters, his videos and performances liberate participants to
explore aspects of their personalities through art in a way that
would otherwise probably be impossible. In a series of large-scale
photographs, Herring documents strangers’ faces after hours
of spitting colorful food dye, recording a moment of exhaustion
and intensity that doubles as a form of abstract painting. Herring’s
use of photography takes an extreme turn in his most recent series
of photo-sculptures. For these works, Herring painstakingly photographs
a model from all possible angles, then cuts and pastes the photographs
onto the sculptural form of his subject. Herring has received grants
from Artpace; New York Foundation for the Arts; and the Joan Mitchell
Foundation. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among others.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Max Protetch Gallery, New York
Oliver Herring on the Art21 blog |
